My personal toolkit and 16 blogging tools for beginners [2018 update]

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[updated 1/2018] In this post (and podcast!), I’m going to share the essential tools I use every single day to produce and market my content, and highlight the 16 best blogging tools for beginners in 2018.

And I’m about to shock you…

Under no circumstances should you use Bluehost to host your website. (note: not an affiliate link)

**gasps**

Bluehost pays out $60 per referral to their affiliates, which is the only reason you see so many other bloggers spamming Bluehost affiliate links.

Is their hosting really that bad? Probably not, but there are better choices, and I want to highlight those.

So here’s point #1: I actually use these tools.

I’m not going to suggest crappy products just so I can score a short-term affiliate sale. Some of the products below don’t even have affiliate programs.

I value you your trust, and hope you’ll stick around DYEB for the long-term.

Point #2: I’m not getting paid by any of these companies

None of these companies reach out to me. They’re my favorites based on use.

Point #3: Thank you!!

I have been overwhelmed with the positive feedback and tweets you guys have been sending me! I’m really trying to produce quality conversations in the podcast, and it’s nice to know at least some of you seem to enjoy it 😉

It’s because of you I’m able to keep going (literally and emotionally). So, thank you! The first 20 people to comment on this post and share it will receive a free 1st-edition Do You Even Blog t-shirt. Details below.

For a smooth $30/month, you get access to ALL of these tools. Keyword research, domain and keyword tracking, competitor analysis, backlink miner. It’s crazy how good these are, and it’s less than HALF the cost of other SEO tools 🙂

MC makes the list of all-time best blogging tools for beginners. Even in 2017, the age of ConvertKit, Aweber, Infusionsoft, etc)

Quite frankly, it’s the free-est and easiest to get started with. Complete beginners should start collecting subscribers immediately with Mailchimp, and migrate to ConvertKit after ~500-1,000 subscribers…after you figure out what you’re doing.

For more experienced bloggers, ConvertKit absolutely takes the cake. It was created with bloggers in mind, and it shows. It’s powerful, intuitive, and still fair-priced. Give it a go if you’ve got a solid grasp on email marketing and lead gen.

I use inmotion for my main blog as I too started out with bluehost as that’s what everyone said to use. But by the time the site hit 3k page views a month I was having problems. Inmotion is more expensive but I have never had a problem with the service or customer service!

CoSchedule: It’s a paid and actually expensive tool (I think it costs about $30/month). It’s an editorial calendar with drag’n’drop functionality. You can plan all your social media as well as your blog content, webinars, etc. and automate it. I think the headline tool you’ve recommended is also integrated. This is definitely the first tool I get when I reach this monthly revenue.

WP Broken Link Status Checker: It’s exactly what you think it is. It checks your website for broken links. As I have created the most beautiful 404-error-page (not yet online), it’s sad that users will probably never see it. However, it’s a free tool with the ability to save some of your users time as well as some of their frustrations.

Thanks for the streak suggestion. Headline Analyzer used to be free, now it’s baked in to the paid service… I think. I’m a tool junkie. Trying to use fewer tools better. Evernote is doing God’s work… so good?

Great list! As a newbie it can be so hard to wade through all of the referral links to see if something really is worth getting. I fell into the ConvertKit trap from the get go and for someone just starting out and not having time to use it to its full potential it definitely wasn’t worth it.
Will check out Snappa, Soolve and Sumo now.

When I first started looking into starting a blog, I honestly thought Bluehost was my only option. The day before I went to start, I happened across a blog post on Siteground and had to pause everything to look up the differences. All I could find once I started looking harder were poor reviews of Bluehost, and recommendations for Siteground. My blog is still in its early, simple stages, but I’ve had no issues with Siteground so far. Plus I hear their customer service is really great.

I never understood every all the people pushing bluehost – reviews were pretty poor and their $3.95 per month was only if you paid in full for 3 years. Siteground is 3.95 for one year and has much better reviews. Thanks for sharing all of this!

Also, as a personal observation – I don’t mind sponsorships on your site or on the podcasts. I expect that if people are giving me valuable content for free, then they should make money somehow. Don’t worry about “offending” people with sponsorships if they are sponsors you believe in. Your “real” audience won’t mind you making some money! You put out great stuff and am thankful for it! Thanks!

Thanks so much for the kind words, RVP! I’ve gotten a bit better about that the past few weeks.

I also couldn’t agree with you more. Siteground and Namecheap are easily my top 2 recommendations for people these days. One can literally get 1 year of hosting, domain name, AND SSL for $12 on Namecheap. That’s insane.

Ok, so I’m commenting again (haha) but I have to say, Snappa is awesome. I started to use it to make Pinterest graphics and it’s SO EASY!! No learning curve, and I love that there’s no drop down menus (darn it PicMonkey!). Canva gets glitchy sometimes. Also, Snappa’s templates are better for bloggers. I think I’m going to stick with Snappa as my graphics tool! And I’m just using the free version right now 😀 Thank you Pete for recommending Snappa! I would’ve never heard about it otherwise.

Great list, Pete! And it was great to meet you at FinCon. Quite a few of these are new to me. Snappa looks interesting. I have Adobe CC but the programs are all ridiculously fiddly. I’d love a simpler tool.

Also, $77/month seems like a lot to me for email though. I just switched from Bluehost hosted email (free and actually quite good if you just use mail clients instead of the lousy web interface) to Zoho (free, but I’m encountering some notable bugs).

I had to leave Bluehost email because I’m cancelling their hosting. I just switched from Bluehost to DreamHost and my server response time improved from 7.2 seconds (Bluehost) to 700ms (DreamHost). Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool tells me I should get it under 200ms, but I was pretty impressed by that improvement with only a host change.